I find this recipe for “Toast Soup” profoundly soothing. Just reading the copy, looking at the pictures, thinking about how manageable this could be, should I choose to get up and make myself food today, brings me great joy and great calm in equal, steady waves.

Toast soup — containing both toast and soup — ought to be the most primal of comfort foods, suitable to be fed to any ill person or baby. Not to mention the rest of us — grown, technically-well adults who’ve maybe had a long day. And, yes, toast soup is all that its name implies: soothing, restorative, uncomplicated.

Probably this is all related to “shut-in culture” and adult-onset-emotional paralysis, but let’s not examine this too closely, shall we? Just think about toast soup. Think about eating it with a big wooden spoon. Perhaps you are a soft little bear who has been running around in the woods all day, and you live in a tree with your mother, who loves you and has made you this toast soup.

The bitter element here is the toast, which you burn intentionally. “Don’t be afraid,” the author Jennifer McLagan writes. “Toast that bread until it is burnt on the edges and very dark in the middle.”

For toast soup, which McLagan adapted from L’Astrance restaurant in Paris, you’ll first make an enriched broth out of bacon (a.k.a. let bacon sit in warm chicken stock for 20 minutes), then sop it up with burnt sourdough. After adding hot milk, Dijon, and vinegar from the jar of cornichons you forgot were in the fridge door, you blend all of it. Yes, even the bacon. Don’t worry about it.

I won’t worry about it. I won’t worry about anything.

It will look a bit like a full-bellied mushroom soup, but its taste — yeasty, earthy, tangy — is oddly reminiscent of a beer and cheese soup, without beer or cheese. I credit the bread, which also makes the broth thick and hearty, with delightful tiny bits of bacon and softened bread crust to bite down on as you go.

These ragtag ingredients balance each other gracefully, but you can do this anytime: Next time you make a bread soup — pappa al pomodoro, ribollita, salmorejo — consider toasting or even charring the bread first. The Maillard reaction isn’t limited to steaks — browning just about anything will give it a more developed flavor.

This is good. I will burn bread, and I will make soup, and I will blend it, and I will eat it, and I will eat it with a wooden spoon, and I will be okay, and all manner of things will be okay.

[Image via Food52]